Daughter of Black Lake

by Cathy Marie Buchanan

  “Someone’s got to. They’re not coming home.”

  “The old woman says they’re with the rebels in the highlands.”

  “We all know they’re not.”

  “Can’t bear the truth. She loved Old Smith. I’ll give her that.”

  “I’m setting out for Hill Fort next chance I get.”

  “Better that than hauling water and starving here.”

  “The old woman’s got plenty to trade.”

  Young Smith slammed down his spoon, though his bowl still held porridge. He got up. “I’ll be in the forge,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Cook was prone to a scaly, itchy rash, and a day or two later, she called at Devout’s door. As Devout applied a chickweed balm to flared-up wrists, Cook said, “The old woman badgers day and night. She pats the spot beside her and when Young Smith sits, she says, ‘You need to take Reddish as your mate.’ She holds up a hand, blocking his refusal, insists they need the clan united with a clan on the rise. ‘At Black Lake, that’s the Hunters,’ she says.”

  “She knows Old Smith isn’t coming back,” Devout said. That flickering sliver of light had sputtered to black.

  “Her eyes glisten, but tears don’t come.”

  Devout thought of the golden brooch daily pinned to the woman’s dress now and the belt, decorated with bronze plaques, strung around her waist—ornaments usually reserved for feast days. It made Devout’s head wag, that show of wealth and dominance from a woman whose son now labored alone in the forge.

  “She’s got the persistence of a bull,” Cook said. “‘No one’s fairer than Reddish,’ she says, and Young Smith replies that she is spoiled to the core. ‘Quite right,’ his mother says. ‘We all know the way Old Hunter bends to her every whim. You’ll use it to your advantage one day.’”

  “He’s had enough misery,” Devout said to Cook and thought of her own part in delivering it.

  Young Smith was too gentle for Reddish, and his mother should see it. Devout considered the crop of girls coming up. Beyond the hands and Reddish, the choices were slim, but if he held off a few years, Reddish’s younger sister—Second Reddish—was kind and humble and had the same glorious hair as her sister, though one of her eyeteeth bore the shadow that said it would rot.

  “And then, he’s got Old Hunter to contend with,” Cook said.

  “He grasps, Old Hunter does.”

  “He’s bent on keeping the Smiths low.” Cook shook her head. “You know the sword Young Smith just finished?”

  Devout nodded. “The one with the enameled hilt.”

  “He wanted to take it to Hill Fort himself, along with a pair of flagons and a bronze shield. But Old Hunter said no.”

  “He forbade it?” Under Old Smith, the tradesmen were free to trade their wares at Hill Fort. For the most part, though, they knew Old Smith’s shrewdness, his fairness and were content to let him arrange trades on their behalf.

  Cook nodded. “Old Hunter says he’ll make the trek himself.” She leaned close, whispered, “He can’t bear the idea of Young Smith returning with more than his clan needs to get through Fallow. Can’t bear him sparing a little dried fish for the hands.”

  * * *

  —

  The hand who confessed was next to follow Lark and Crone to Otherworld that Fallow. She swallowed the berries from the bough of mistletoe the druid had brought from Sacred Grove and laid at her feet as a sign of purification. After that, an infant born too small succumbed. The mother, a hand, was thin at the onset of Fallow, thinner still when her labor began, and no amount of stinging nettle would lure milk to her breasts. Old Tanner’s mate, nursing a toddler of her own, refused to act as wet nurse to another child. Why waste milk on so small, so sickly an infant? she said. No different from leaving milk to spoil in the sun.

  Then it was the mother of Old Tanner’s unsparing mate, though she had been taken into the Tanner household, where she lived without want. She had once made a habit of gathering with the other elders, but the woman had not shown her face. It was rumored she had lain on her pallet, declining all but water for the moon since her daughter denied the newly labored hand.

  Two more elders refused nourishment, and the bog dwellers laid the bodies with the remains of Old Tanner’s mate’s mother, the infant, the hand, Crone, and Lark in Bone Meadow. Talk about the nobleness of the elders’ sacrifice swelled. Old Man put his chin in the air and, to Devout and his gathered household, said that he had as much right to food as anyone at Black Lake, that those who thought he should not eat forgot the tilling, the sowing, the reaping he had accomplished while they were at their mothers’ breasts. Second Hand Widow, who had already accused him of pilfering berries gathered by her brood, sneered and said, “You think you’ve got more right than children.” She went to his pallet and produced, from beneath a tattered skin, a handful of broken hazelnut shells. “You weren’t collecting. Too pained in the knees, you said.” She hurled the shells, which bounced from his chest and landed at his feet. She went to the pallet where her children slept, yanked down the woolen blanket covering her second youngest boy, exposing the troughs between his ribs.

  Devout began giving the boy something each day and to his siblings, too—a bit of burdock root, a few acorns, her allotment of hard cheese. Soon she withered on her pallet, drifting in and out of sleep, vaguely listening to the activity around her—the thud and crackle of a log newly added to the fire, a complaint that its maintenance now fell to so few, a cough, a whimper, the pleas beseeching Mother Earth.

  She knew real hunger now, the sort when there was not the strength for pangs. And the boy weak on his pallet, he knew it, too. That he once worked the fields with the diligence of a child twice his age and took the sack from his mother’s shoulder and bore its weight himself only added to the household’s misery.

  Arc did not call at Devout’s roundhouse, she supposed, because surviving Fallow left no time. She thought once or twice of the bliss in the woodland, but what she conjured was vapor rather than sustenance. Desire was mere bait, enticement only those initiated in true hardship could see as a trick. It provided nothing more than the feeling of warmth, the feeling of a sated belly, the feeling of a draft of water held to parched lips. It was not hard cheese—mashed to a pulp, pushed to the back of the throat, delivered to the hollow of a belly, where it was not a mere feeling of warmth but warmth itself.

  She thought of Young Smith. She had heard about the smoked meat, dried fish, and hard cheese Old Hunter had collected for the tradesmen clans at Hill Fort. Surely some ample portion had gone to Young Smith in return for the sword, the flagons, the shield. He had once set her heart aflutter, and yet she had turned from him—so gentle, so generous, so able a provider. She had been a fool, not yet familiar with the realities of a Fallow without wheat.

  Might she rise from her pallet and go to him? Might he spare some hard cheese for the boy with the pronounced ribs? Might he spare some for her? Would he still take her as mate, make true the etching in the old mine? His mother would be an obstacle, but he had gone against her wishes before. The amulet was proof of that. For a glimmer, Devout tasted the richness of fat on her tongue.

  She sometimes felt a spoon held to her lips and then tepid water dribbled into her mouth. Occasionally she was fed a thin mash, some blend of roots, though it seemed that her lips were nudged open ever less frequently, that the roundhouse grew ever quieter. But then, one day, the mash was different. There was the taste of meat. “Good fortune,” her mother whispered. “Two packets of meat left at the door.”

  Devout thought to say “Young Smith” who had meat from Hill Fort, but what left her mouth was more breath than words.

  It was the same meaty mash at the next feeding and the one after that, and she could not say how many more times the mash met her tongue. The feeling of hunger that had slipped away thundered back into her belly, also
the wherewithal to agonize that two packets of meat would soon come to an end.

  She had a pleasant dream. The boy with the protruding ribs was on his feet, his mother steadying him, but nevertheless on his feet. She heard Old Man weeping, or so she thought, and she heard quite clearly her mother tell him, “Hush.” Devout wondered if she was awake when he said he was undeserving of such generosity.

  She took more of the mash and knew the portions she swallowed grew. “Another moon,” her mother said, “and the earth will thaw. There will be sorrel and after that chickweed and nettle.”

  Devout nodded weakly. She attempted a smile.

  “The meat continues,” her mother said, “enough for the household.”

  “Blessings for our benefactor,” Devout whispered too quietly. Her mother put her ear close to Devout’s mouth, and she repeated the words.

  Her mother’s face glowed, lit by Devout’s budding strength, their improved lot now that her daughter fully grasped a tradesman’s ability to provide. Young Smith fed the boy, Old Man, her mother, and herself.

  Then one day, with enough strength to sit on her pallet and lift the spoon to her mouth, Devout saw that the mash was paler in color. On her tongue, she tasted fish. She felt a strange grittiness.

  “Crayfish,” her mother said. “I milled the shell.”

  “Left at the door?” Devout said, thinking it strange if even Young Smith’s family was reduced to crayfish.

  “Yes. A few dozen. Ugly creatures. More troublesome than the squirrel.”

  “Squirrel?”

  “Old Man was certain.”

  Squirrel and crayfish, then.

  Arc knew the patterns of the squirrels, where to find them docile in their nests. He had told her about catching crayfish with only a length of gut and a bit of bone. It was just like him to feed the weak, just like him to leave a packet and retreat unannounced. He would not want to stand before them, hearing their gratitude and saying the squirrel, the crayfish that saved them were what any one of them would have done in his shoes—his shabby, undersized shoes. She swallowed gritty crayfish and felt warmth in her belly, his tenderness toward her. That tenderness had led him deep into the woodland, then north to the river, to some not yet scavenged place. He had knelt on the cold earth, his breeches soaked through at the knees. She thought of his patience, his watchfulness and his hands plunging into frigid water. He had suffered the harshness of Fallow alone and without shelter, had trapped and fished and told himself he could not return to Black Lake until he had the provisions to feed Devout and the household that would become his.

  Her mother ran her fingers through Devout’s matted, greasy hair and made as if to get up from the pallet, as if to collect the bone comb, but she hesitated. “He works so hard in the fields, always trying to spare you what he can.”

  Her mother meant Arc, and yet, with Devout’s view so newly altered, she could not grasp that her mother already knew what Devout had only just figured out.

  “It’s Arc, then, our benefactor,” Devout said.

  Her mother smiled with all the softness of new grass.

  18.

  HOBBLE

  I hold back from galloping as my father and I approach Black Lake with our loaded handcart. But then, as we take the last bend in the trackway before the woodland opens onto Chieftain’s fields, I see my mother and cannot resist. She catches sight of us and breaks into a smile. She touches her lips, swoops, her fingertips just grazing the earth as she hurtles along the trackway. I meet her arms, feel my slight mother’s strength, her lips burrowing, kissing, nuzzling deep into my curls. And then she is off, looping her arms around my father’s neck, and hugging and kissing, and then cupping his face in her palms and kissing him again.

  With her unfiltered glee, her looping arms, and cupping palms, my usually reticent mother is a conundrum.

  “Oh, Smith,” she says. “The longest six days of my life.”

  He grins, radiant as the bloom of day. “Just look,” he says, sweeping a hand toward the cart.

  She touches the stacked iron bars.

  “I have work,” he says. “I have a promise of more work to come.”

  “Chieftain remembered, then.”

  “I have an arrangement with a trader called Luck.”

  “Luck!” she says.

  “Tedious work. Tent pegs, for now, at any rate. But never mind that.”

  “Come. I’ve collected enough eggs for a feast.” She slips an arm around his waist, takes my hand.

  “Fox?” he says as we begin walking.

  “He comes and goes.”

  “Is he here now?” I say and hold my breath.

  She swings my held hand forward and back, as if to make light of the answer she will give. “He just got back.”

  “Back from where?”

  “He never says.” She opens a palm empty of an answer. “His horse is worn out.”

  “They’re in the settlements again,” my father says. “Luck told us there were druids at Timber Bridge. He claims they mean to stir up the tribesmen.”

  “Like you said.” The merriment cleanly washes from her face, and she drops my hand.

  “Anything more—” My father does not need to finish. We all know he is asking about further violence from Fox.

  My mother shakes her head.

  I look toward the wheat fields, which radiate a first blush of green. “The wheat’s coming up,” I say, summoning all the vigor of a bird chirping its morning song, but my voice is pitiable. Fox remains at Black Lake and none of us believe we have seen the end of his brutality.

  * * *

  —

  Hunter is at our door, even before I have unpacked the bronze lamp, vessel of olive oil, fresh hide, and length of undyed wool bundled inside my cape. He calls out my name, and then with my father standing guard, says, “My mother asks for you.”

  My father nods that I should go.

  I have spent long evenings comforting his ailing mother, combing her hair, rubbing her limbs, feeding her the sweet violet draft that eases sleep. With one foot already in Otherworld and her mind addled, she regularly sets loose the thoughts rattling in her head. I have coaxed, interrogated even, shaking free what I can. Just now, though plucked from my homecoming, I am glad to draw a comb through thin hair and delay the moment when I must face Fox.

  “You attended when my mother took Arc as her mate?” I say to Hunter’s mother.

  She twists around, looks at me doubtfully. Of course, she was there, as was every bog dweller then taking breath at Black Lake. “Not much of a feast as I remember it,” she says, “but the bonfire! Such a party we had that night.”

  She pats my hand, I suppose in consolation that she speaks warmly of the celebration that marked my mother’s first union. “Your father loved your mother even then,” she says. “Drunk as blazes that night and telling anyone who would listen she’d be his mate one day.”

  I like the idea—a refuge of drunken certainty—amid what must have been a miserable Hope.

  “Your mother and Arc”—an almost girlish smile crosses the old woman’s lips—“the sex between those two. Talk of the settlement. In the tall grass, a few strides from the wheat, their scythes barely put down. Atop Edge. In the woodland, with nightfall only just arrived.”

  I pull the comb, taking care not to disrupt the rhythm, her words, but then Hunter is upon us, hovering, arms knotted at his chest.

  “Your father had success?” he says, though he plainly saw a handcart empty of cauldrons and loaded with iron bars.

  “Yes.”

  “Which trader?”

  I shrug, because I cannot say to my father’s rival that a trader who supplies the Roman army provided the iron. “I went to look at the wool.”

  “You roamed Hill Fort on your own?” He huffs disbelief.

  I draw the c
omb from hairline to crown to the far reach of the old woman’s hair.

  “I could send you home with a partridge,” he says.

  “We’d all appreciate your generosity.”

  He slides his hands along his thighs as he squats to eye level with me. “You should know I have friends at Hill Fort,” he says.

  With great effort, his mother lifts herself to unsteady feet. “I’ll sleep now.” Then, as unsparing as vengeance, she adds, “You’ll give the girl a partridge.”

  * * *

  —

  I arrive home to find the low table set with four mugs, four plates, a platter piled high with fried eggs, and another with hard cheese and bread. My father stops pouring mead and extends his chin toward the partridge. “A cartload of iron and Hunter is inspired to make peace?”

  “A partridge? He’s feeling generous,” my mother says. “You’re back just in time.”

  She calls to Fox, who emerges from his sleeping alcove, eclipsing the moment when I might have corrected my parents. We usually serve ourselves, but my mother knows the hunger of a man and a maiden walking six days and the tendency of Fox to take more than his share. As she divvies up the meal, I look to my father, who nods, and I scamper off to my sleeping alcove to fetch the olive oil that brings sweetness to dipped bread.

  My father, my mother, and Fox seat themselves while I pour a small amount of the oil into a shallow bowl. “Try it,” I say, handing my mother a piece of bread.

  She looks puzzled.

  “Like this,” I say and dab bread into oil. Sweetness spreads over my tongue.

  “Olive oil,” my father says and smiles.

  “Roman oil,” Fox says and swipes a hand across the table, sending the shallow bowl skittering into the rushes.

  My father bolts to his feet. “We got it from a tribesman, a trader at Hill Fort”—his voice is almost calm—“a gift for Devout.” His fingers clench, unclench.